1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to access control in an operating system in a data processing system and, more particularly, to a system, method and computer program product for supporting a plurality of Access Control List types for a file system in an operating system.
2. Description of Related Art
An Access Control List (ACL) is used as a mechanism for determining the appropriate access rights to a given object. The ACL is a data structure, typically a table, containing entries that specify the rights of an individual or group to access specific system objects such as a program, a process or a file. Each accessible object contains an identifier to its ACL. The privileges or permissions determine specific access rights, such as whether a user can read from, write to or execute an object.
The ACL is a concept with several different implementations in various operating systems. Current operating systems support only one ACL type per file system instance or use a different mechanism for each ACL type. In an operating system that has multiple file systems supporting the same ACL type, each file system must have code to handle the ACL type on an individual basis.
NFS V4 is being adopted by most of the leading operating system providers to be the industry-wide standard protocol for network file sharing. As indicated above, an operating system typically supports only one ACL type. If it is desired to add one or more additional ACL types to an operating system, it is usually necessary to create a different mechanism to handle each additional ACL type.
It would, accordingly, be desirable to provide a system wide framework and method for supporting a plurality of ACL types for a file system in an operating system that requires only a single framework to handle the different ACL types.